“What we both wanted,” he corrected evenly.
She hesitated. “Fair enough.”
And in that moment, nearly desperate, panickylikingfor the person she was surged through him, brilliant and painful. She was not a bullshitter.
On the surface of things they were only talking about sex. He knew he was the one who ought to say the other things. The things about feelings and the future.
But just as there was something on her mind tonight that she didn’t say out loud, there was something he wasn’t saying, too.
And it was this that scared him into silence.
She’d wrapped her arms across the front of her. As if to keep herself from flying to pieces. Or to shield herself from him.
And he could feel invisible arms, too. Holding him back. Like that desperate nightmare he’d had where she’d thrown his stone heart into the water at Devil’s Leap and vanished in after it. And he’d tried to get a word out, even if only her name. And he just didn’t have a voice.
She turned around and went back to the house.
And he watched her go, until she disappeared inside.